The days of turning in assignments and retaking tests six weeks after they were due for an easy hundred are over thanks to the new McKinney ISD grading policy.
The new district grading policy, which took effect Oct. 21, states that students who receive below an 80 on any assignment, from test to daily grade, may retake that assignment for up to an 80 within a period of five days.
Under the former grading policy, students could retake any assignment as many times as necessary for up to a 100 with no time limit for retakes or deadline to turn in late work.
“It [the old grading policy] was terrible, and that’s about the nicest way I can put it,” core, Pre-AP and AP Biology teacher Mrs. Melissa Vance said. “It was unclear, everything was teacher discretion, there was no consistency, one teacher would do something one way and another a different way and when you tried to enforce your way, they [the students] compared you to everyone else.”
Mrs. Vance, who teaches six periods of various biology classes this year, taught four periods of AP Biology and two periods of Chemistry last year. Under the old grading policy, Mrs. Vance said, students abused the lax deadlines and didn’t turn in work or retake failed tests or quizzes until the final week of the quarter.
“It was very stressful, especially when they changed it to where you could redo absolutely anything, from tests to quizzes to a homework, whatever,” Mrs. Vance said. “It was irritating to me because I’m a flexible person anyway. If someone had come and said to me ‘I couldn’t get this done because I had to babysit my siblings,’ or ‘This tragedy happened,’ I’m pretty understanding and would be fine with that. But just the laziness of ‘Oh, I’m not going to do it today, I’ll do it six weeks from now and you have to take it,’ that was annoying because at the end of the quarter I’d end up with more grading than I had all quarter and only 24 hours to do it.”
The McKinney ISD Board of Trustees adheres to the policy of “mastery learning,” which focuses on grasping a concept rather than just getting a good grade. While the former retesting policy attempted to promote an atmosphere of “mastery learning” by allowing every assignment to be made up to a 100, the new policy requires students to go in for tutoring before taking their one retake.
“There is something to be said for a teacher requiring to do some work before they come in and retake,” AP Government and Social Studies department head Ms. Jenna Hogan said. “You don’t want to make the retake easier than the test because if you make the retake easier, the no one’s going to do well and then you’re going to get swamped [in retests] and everyone’s going to get behind.”
Test corrections have been cited as non-valid forms of retesting under both the old and new policies. This, according to senior Amanda Bulot, is the biggest problem of the new policy and hinders “mastery learning.”
“If you want to come in and work to better yourself and learn from your mistakes you can’t anymore because they took away test corrections,” Amanda said. “You should be able to do test corrections if you’re willing to come in, figure out what you did wrong and understand it better.”
But according to Mrs. Vance, requiring students to come in for tutoring before a retest promotes a better environment of “mastery learning.” The 80-percent cap, Mrs. Vance says, ensures that students who come to retake aren’t students who want earn a few points back on a test or who need to retake a quarter’s worth of work to pass, but students who want to better themselves.
“It gives the kids who always did want the opportunity to come in, get some tutoring, retake and master the material the opportunity to do that, and I think that’s positive,” Mrs. Vance said. “There were always people who were never going to come anyway and it just felt like you were chasing after those people.”
As for UIL eligibility concerns, Ms. Hogan says that the new policy will help keep students on track to make UIL grade-checks because the five-day time limit on retakes ensures UIL grade-checks won’t sneak up on students. Despite this, Ms. Hogan says, the policy still focuses too much on grades and not an environment of mastery.
“We tell kids ‘hey, you can retake, hey, you can retake’ and suddenly UIL grade check’s here,” Ms. Hogan said. “By offering all these retakes, we’ve created a culture of ‘I don’t have to do well the first time because I can just retake it later.’ That’s why we’re still trying to come up with a true philosophy of mastery learning.”
by Ben Johnson
